Body positive Instagrammer poses unclothed to prove 'there’s a beautiful mermaid at every shape and size'

You’d never guess this 25-year-old bombshell who posed without any clothing on while splayed out on a rock and shared the photos with her nearly 100,000 followers spent 22 years of her life “afraid of” and “hating” her body. Especially since this isn’t the first time she’s posed in such a vulnerable and revealing way.

Sure, Jewelz Mazzei loves her body now, but the journey to this point was rocky…pun intended. She celebrated the end of that journey with a mermaid-esque photo shoot on top of a rock. The bombshell shared the final product with her fans in August, posting a stunning photo of her looking off into the distance while perched on a huge stone in a position that kept her goodies off camera. She captioned the photo with a Mae West quote: “I never loved another person the way I loved myself.” But that wasn’t always the case for Mazzei.

“I had been afraid of my body for 22 years, afraid to show it and the hate I had for it,” she tells Yahoo Lifestyle. “For 22 years I didn’t think I was good enough because of my body. Never showing it or praising it. I wanted to do this shoot to express the way I feel about my body and the way others should feel about there own body and that is loved.”

In recent weeks, she reposted the first photo with the eloquent and metaphorical caption, “Every rock that’s been thrown at me, I use as a stepping stone. For all the times I was laughed at for being fat, For all the times they told me I was pretty for a big girl, For all the times I’ve been shammed to lose weight, For all the times I’ve been called a horrific name, For the 2 times I’ve had garbage thrown at me from a car window, For the times people have told me to kill myself on Instagram. Each of these rocks and many more lay beneath me, adding another one every single day. As I sit confidently on top, my pile continues to grow, as does the love I have for myself.”

Then, a few days ego, she posted what is quite possibly the best version of them all: a meme that was created using her photo. The meme read, “there’s a beautiful mermaid at every shape and size.” And Mazzei loves it. She shared the meme on her Instagram, with the caption, “To Whomever made this, I LOVE YOU!”

She says that found out about the meme from a follower. “They sent it to me in a direct message.” And this meme has a meaning — a big one. “For me the meme represents body love and acceptance and beauty in one another. And there is nothing more beautiful than that.”

So, obviously, she’s received a lot of positive reactions to those photos. “The reactions were both positive and negative, like anything else in life,” she reasons. But to Mazzei, it’s all worth it. “It always makes everything worthwhile when sharing my body helps people appreciate their own and learn to love it too.”

For Mazzei, there is no such thing as being afraid, which is why it’s not uncommon for her to strip down to her skivvies, or even farther, for a photo.

Even for the most confident people, taking off their clothes and climbing up a rock in public must be a little nerve-wracking. But for Mazzei, the only things worth her worries were the spiders running around the rock. “But seriously it was super easy and so natural and freeing, and I think that’s because I’m comfortable in my body,” she explains. “There’s nothing to hide.”